While the Color Chart show was practically empty during most of my visit, the other sixth floor exhibition space was completely packed, both with people and with things to look at. “Design and the Elastic Mind” is a fascinating, fun show that deserved more time than I had to give it yesterday. One problem was that because the show was so crowded, you feel rushed to read the display cards and move along quickly. Yet many of the objects on display require some contemplation and reading the placards is important to understand what you are seeing. (If only they could “design” a better way to put on a show like this…? I guess the online interactive interface is pretty nifty, though it’s very hard to read on my screen and a bit overwhelming.)

The exhibition is about innovation and how designers are trying to solve some of the problems the world faces in a time of rapid change and major dislocations. Mostly what I got out of it was a sense of how exciting it might be to be a researcher or product designer working on these problems. (Not quite exciting enough for me to think about reverting to my prior career, however.)

Of the dozens and dozens of items on display, there are a few that particularly stick in the mind. Philip Worthington’s Shadow Monster had people lining up to give it a try. You enter a room with a giant lightbox behind you and a large screen in front of you, ostensibly with your shadow being cast onto the screen. Yet something is not quite right: the shadow isn’t exactly you, but rather a monstrous (in a playful way) adaptation, with chirps, burps, and roars of audio as well as amazing cartoon-like shadow animation (e.g., flick your wrist and you can cause your shadow monster to flick off some flying birds, or open your hands like jaws and your shadow somehow has teeth!). This one had the kids giggling and the grownups laughing along as well. (I should note that, unlike the Color Chart show, Design and the Elastic Mind was full of kids.)

A number of information visualizations caught my eye. Aaron Koblin used North American flight data to create a dazzling, firework-like sparkler of flight paths. In a similar display, the “New York Telephone Exchange” animates the volume of phone calls between New York City and the rest of the world. Various parts of the globe grow and shrink over time as the volume of traffic ebbs and flows (though it seems we have a lot of traffic to and from India no matter the time of day).

Many products on display aim to help the world, from “solar-powered” water decontamination jugs to efficient space heaters. At a time when the world sometimes seems out of control without much cause for optimism, I found that, at least a little bit, it was a relief to be presented with some evidence that there are people out there coming up with very out-of-the-box, transformative solutions to some challenging problems. If you have any interest at all in technology, design, or what the future might look like, I’d highly recommend a visit to this show.

My first stop (after a mediocre breakfast at a cafe on 53rd @ 7th Ave) on a busy art day was a visit to the Museum of Modern Art. This was a day when museum memberships prove their worth as I was able to avoid the very long lines outside the museum and stroll right in at the 10:30am opening time. The nice thing about getting in at 10:30am at MoMA is that if you know where you’re going, you can beat most of the crowd to the exhibits and have a chance to look at things more closely before the throngs start clogging the galleries.

The Color Chart show focuses on the use of systems, chance, and ready-made colors in art since 1950. I found the show quite stimulating to look at, though it was perhaps not the kind of “inspired-to-go-home-and-paint-right-away” exhibition that I might have expected. Most of the work displayed little brushstroke or other articulation, with flat color application the norm. That said, there were a number of pieces worth noting.

Francois Morellet had a piece in the first room of the exhibition which filled a grid of something like 40,000 tiny squares with either red or blue paint, using numbers in the phone book to determine which color to apply. Even numbers yield one color, odd numbers the other. If I hadn’t read the wall label to learn that the numbers were thusly distributed, I would have stared at the painting longer to see if it “popped” like a 3d stereogram.

I’m not usually a big fan of John Chamberlain’s work (they’re fun, but if you’ve seen fifty…), but I enjoyed the enamel (car-paint?) coated panels on display here with names like “Elvis”. I think these are the first time I’ve seen Chamberlains that weren’t crushed cars.

I also don’t usually get excited by the light sculptures of Dan Flavin, but a particularly playful (and very bright) installation here at MoMA was worth the green afterimages it produced in my eyes. In the room following Flavin, Byron Kim’s “Synechdoche” seemed to glow green and purple in between the flesh-colored panels, either my eyes playing tricks on me or more likely the lingering effects and leaking light from the adjoining Flavin display. (In the aptly named piece — Synechdoche is a type of metaphor where a part is used to stand in for the whole — Kim paints each panel a different flesh tone based on a real person’s actual skin color.)

A Blinky Palermo piece made from dyed cotton stood out with its simple, Ellsworth Kelly-like composition of red & blue rectangles. (Kelly is also included in the show with his random grid of colored squares.)

I love Sol LeWitt’s work and Wall Drawing #91, a grid with each square marked by “non-straight” lines of three separate color pencils, didn’t disappoint (though it was not as exciting as a work I had seen at MoCA in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago).

Near the end of the exhibit in a side nook, a suite of Katharina Fritsch paintings practically glowed. Each piece consisted of a panel or canvas of smoothly applied color surrounded by a deep metallic frame that reflected color and light from the center of the piece as well as from other works in the room.

In the last gallery, I found a video by Cory Arcangel somewhat compelling. I can’t recall the exact algorithm described on the wall panel, but here’s the gist: Arcangel digitally reworked the movie “Colors” so that it consisted solely of vertical bands of color based on pixels in the original movie. It’s intriguing to watch the stripes dance on the screen in sync with the audio and to note how the color themes change depending upon the scene.

On a final note, the staff at MoMA wore Daniel Buren-designed vests of variously colored, presumably 8.7cm-wide stripes. I asked one of the guards if they get to keep the vests after the show. He looked at me, perplexed, and shook his head, “No.”

Yesterday was an art-filled day from start to finish. I took the train in to NYC where my first stop was MoMA to see the “Color Chart” and “Design and the Elastic Mind” shows. From there, I headed north to the Whitney Museum for the preview day of the Biennial. Pushing forward, I hoofed it up to the Met to check out the Jasper Johns “Gray” show. With a little bit of time left before needing to catch the train back home, I slogged through the Courbet and Poussin installations at the Met, probably not giving them enough time but without any interest in going back for more. Finally, after returning to Jersey, I attended the opening reception for the “Mercer County Artists” show at The Gallery @ Mercer County Community College. I’ll report further on these in separate posts.